Companion Classics. 



A 



amous Americans, 

BY 

Hon. JUSTIN MCCARTHY, 

Member of Parliament. 






t 




Perry Mason & Company. 



Companion Classics. 



ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM, 

By William Ewart Gladstone. 

A BOY SIXTY YEARS AGO. 

By Hon. Geo. F, Hoar. 

FAMOUS AMERICANS, 

By Hon. Justin McCarthy, M. P. 

PRICE, 10 CENTS EACH. 




JUSTIN McCarthy, m.p. 



Companion Classics. 



amous Americans, 



BY 



Hon. Justin McCarthy, 

Member of Parliament. 



Reprint from The Youth's Companion, 



Boston. 
Perry Mason & Company. 



.Hit 






/^NE of the happiest things that can befall a 
human being is to be born with the gift of 
appreciation. The man of eclectic tastes and 
generous sympathies finds friends everywhere ; 
and when he himself possesses originality and 
energy, the elements of power, he naturally 
associates with the leaders of the race, learning 
to know them as they really are. 

Mr. Justin McCarthy, M. P., most fully 
answers this description. A man of action as 
well as a man of letters, almost equally at home 
in America and in Great Britain, he has met the 
makers of history, and his portraits of them 
have the very charm of life. 




Famous Americans. 



|HE first American household to which 
I was welcomed when I first visited 
the States was the home of William 
CuUen Bryant, on Long Island, in New 
York harbor. Mr. Bryant accompanied us in 
the steamer from New York and pointed out 
every place of interest on the way, among others 
the island off which Fenimore Cooper's Water 
Witch was lying when the story begins. Oh, 
the dear delights of that Water Witch ! When 
I was a boy I loved it — and the sight of the 
island brought back my boyhood. 

Mr. Bryant was a delightful host and a 
charming companion. He was not a large and 
impressive man in figure, but he had a superb 
and Jupiter-like head. His reading was immense 
and varied. He had travelled much and remem- 
bered what he saw. He knew several languages, 
and could make an eloquent speech in French, 
Italian, German or Spanish. 

Bryant impressed me almost terribly by his 
knowledge of trees and plants. While we were 
driving together round and about his country 
home he often embarrassed me by asking whether 
this or that tree or plant flourished in England, 
and if so, in what particular part of England. 
Well, I think I know an oak when I see it, but I 
am not always quite sure. I know a poplar — 
everybody knows a poplar; I know a birch, and 
I know a palm, but there my knowledge ends. 



8 Famous Americayis. 

With Bryant I felt mightily ashamed of my 
ignorance. 

But we talked of poetry a great deal, and of 
poets, and public men of all kinds, and artists 
of all kinds — and he was well acquainted with 
the great picture-galleries of Europe. Our 
friendship kept on up to the time of my second 
return to England, just before his death. 

Bryant once gave me a fine photograph ot 
himself. It still hangs in my study, where I am 
writing this. I turn to look up at the noble 
forehead, the superb and patriarchal beard. I 
may say frankly that Bryant the man impressed 
me far more than Bryant the poet, although I 
was in sympathy with his poetry and had appre- 
ciated it since I was a small boy in an Irish 
seaport city. 

First Meeting with Emerson. 

It was at a comparatively late period of my 
first visit to America that I made the acquaint- 
ance of Boston. The first visitor we had in 
Boston was Emerson, the second was Longfellow. 
I had written to Emerson's house at Concord, 
enclosing my letter of introduction, and as he 
happened to be coming to town, he at once called 
on me. When I received his card I felt a thrill 
of emotion which I could hardly describe. 

Emerson had always been an idol among the 
young men and women with whom I was asso- 
ciated from my most youthful days, and I could 
hardly realize that in a moment or two I was to 
stand in the graced presence of the man himself. 
I need hardly say that Emerson soon put me at 
my ease. 

The first that impressed me about him was the 



Famous Americans. 9 

total absence of anything like the manner of 
what I may call the professional philosopher. 
He talked away easily and pleasantly about 
places and books and men. He had read English 
literature quite " up to date," as the distressing 
English phrase now puts it. He asked me about 
an English author of what seemed to be rising 
distinction then, — a man long since dead and I 
fear almost forgotten, — who had been staying a 
few days in Boston, and had not made himself 
known to anybody. 

"We should have been so glad to welcome 
him ! " Emerson said. 

I explained that the author was a very modest 
man. 

" But he might have thought of us," Emerson 
replied, with a sweet smile, "and have sacrificed 
his own feelings for the pleasure it would give 
us." 

Now the author in question had then quite 
lately published his first book. — his first and, I 
believe, his last, — and although many of us in 
London thought highly of it, I had not expected 
that it would be known to any one on the 
American side of the Atlantic. I have regretted 
that I did not write at once to the English author 
and tell him what Emerson thought of his book. 

At the Saturday Club. 

I told Emerson that I had letters of introduc- 
tion to some distinguished men in Boston. He 
at once, with a bright smile, told me that the 
best way of meeting most of them was to be his 
guest at the next dinner of the Saturday Club. 

On the day when I was Emerson's guest, 
Longfellow was there, and Holmes, James T. 



lo Fa?nous Americans. 

Fields, Whipple, and many more whose names 
Avere familiar to me, and whom it was a delight 
to see and to hear and to talk with. Lowell, for 
some reason, was not there. I think the only 
visitor from London besides myself was Fechter, 
the once-famous actor, who had come out with 
the intention of settling in the States. I had 
many questions to ask of Emerson that night. 

I was greatl}' interested in hearing Emerson 
talk about Walt Whitman, whom he had himself 
but lately introduced to the public of America, 
and even of England. "A strong man," he- 
said, after many other words of appreciation 
and of eulogy, "but method is needed even for 
strength." Then he reminded me of the won- 
derful method in symmetry and muscle of the 
Farnese Hercules. A day or two later he took 
me round most of the public institutions of 
Boston, and in the Athenseum, I think it was, we 
came upon a cast of that same Hercules. Then 
he recalled to me what he had been saying 
concerning strength and method. 

Wendell Phillips's Convictions. 

We talked about Wendell Phillips, whom I 
had already met in New York, and he expressed 
his regret that Phillips could not be prevailed 
upon to come to any of the dinners of the Satur- 
day Club, for he was so strong a devotee of total 
abstinence that he was unwilling to be present 
at a dinner w^here wine was drunk. I began to 
express somewhat emphatically my regret that 
a man so gifted and otherwise so genial should 
have such rigid views. Emerson smiled his 
sweet smile again, and said, " Well, well, I know 
how much Wendell Phillips likes pleasant and 



Famous Americans, ii 

intellectual company, and so let us at least give 
him the credit of his hair-shirt." 



**A Gracious Reality.'* 

I saw Emerson several times after that during 
my first and second visits to the States. He was 
singularly kind, and I may be allowed to say 
that at that time I had no claim whatever on 
him but that established by some common 
friendships and many common sympathies. 

vSince his death I have seen his house in 
Concord. I made a pilgrimage to the place, 
and wandered round the roads and visited the 
Walden of Thoreau. But Thoreau was only a 
shadow to me, — a man whose writings I had 
read and whom I had read of, — while Emerson 
was a strong and gracious reality. 

Thinking of Emerson and my own personal 
intercourse with him, slight and casual, indeed, 
but to me most impressive, I have wondered 
whether men of his elevation and his gifts really 
quite understand how much delight they pour 
into the life of a stranger by a friendly reception 
and a few kindly talks. I have still two or three 
letters of his, and I am not likely to lose them 
or to part with them. 

Expecting to find him stately, serene, solemn, 
perhaps even severe, I found him fresh, genial, 
buoyant in manner, utterly above all self- 
consciousness, disposed to enter with the fullest 
sympathy and the quickest interest into the 
feelings and the ideas of any one v\'ith whom he 
was conversing. 

I have met a good many famous men, but I do 
not know that any one among them impressed 



12 Famous Americans, 

me more strongly and more sweetly than did 
Kmerson. 

The Charm of Longfellow. 

I have already said that the second famous 
American who called on me in Boston was 
Longfellow, who had been for years before I 
saw him an especial favorite with the English 
public, and with the Irish public as well. He 
took our hearts by storm. 

It was an almost incredible delight to me to 
see him, and to find myself in conversation with 
him. His talk was charming — easy, bright, 
vivacious, utterly unaffected. He knew many 
parts of the Old World very well, and we had 
several acquaintanceships in common. 

Longfellow asked us to his house in Cam- 
bridge, and of course we went more than once. 
The acquaintanceship was kept up during the 
whole of my first and second visits to the United 
States. Then a long interval occurred ; many 
things happened, and when I went back to the 
States a few years ago Longfellow was dead. 

I have never met a more gracious host than 
Longfellow, nor a more kindly companion, 
although certain Boston people have told me 
that they found him somewhat cold, and even 
chilling. I always found Longfellow most 
genial, unaffected and delightful. 

Once I ventured to argue with him about 
Goethe, of whom I have always been a passionate 
admirer. When I insisted that Longfellow had 
disparaged Goethe in "Hyperion," Longfellow 
gently but firmly insisted that he had done 
nothing of the kind. I held fast to my point — 
as if I did not know my "Hyperion" better 



Famous Americans. 13 

than he did ! At last the poet went to his 
shelves, took down the volume, and challenged 
me to find the disparaging passage. In half a 
moment I found it, sure enough ; so he pleasantly 
owned up, said he had quite forgotten all about 
writing it, and that he certainly would not think 
of uttering such words of disparagement now. 
I was very proud of my triumph, mainly because 
it made it clear to him that I knew his book 
better than he did. 

Translations of a Masterpiece. 

I asked him about the beautiful and almost 
perfect translation brought into "Hyperion" 
from Uhland's ballad — the translation opening 
with the lines : 

Many a year is in its grave 
Since last I crossed this restless wave. 
And the evening, bright as ever, 
Shines on ruin, rock and river. 

He told me the translation was not by him, 
but by a lady. He did not tell me who she was, 
and I did not ask him, for fear lest I should, 
perhaps, be awakening melancholy reflections. 
He said, as indeed he has said in "Hyperion," 
that the one thing in which it fell short of the 
original was in failing to produce the peculiar 
measure which seemed like the accompaniment 
of the rocking of a boat. 

I told him of a translation by a poet, a coun- 
tryman of mine, long since dead, in which 
everything else had been sacrificed to the repro- 
duction of this peculiar measure — a measure 
easy and natural in German, but not easy or 
natural in English. I recited the version to 



14 Fatnous Americans. 

him. He agreed \vith me that the reproduction 
of the measure was most skilfully accomplished, 
but that it was done at the sacrifice of much of 
the beauty of the poem. 

Longfellow liked to show off his pictures and 
busts and casts and curios, and to tell some 
little anecdote or give some interesting explana- 
tion about each. 

In Love with the Elizabethans. 

He had a strong love for many of the dramas 
not by Shakespeare, of the Elizabethan dramas, 
I mean. He could quote with exquisite taste 
some beautiful and thrilling passages from 
Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or 
Webster. As I, too, had, and have, a strong 
affection for those rarely read dramatists, any 
one can guess what pleasure I found in Long- 
fellow's keen and artistic appreciation of their 
beauty, strength, pathos and passion. 

I think nothing impressed me more in Long- 
fellow than his unforced and genial toleration of 
differences of opinion. Yet I have heard men 
say in the States that he was not tolerant except 
where literature and art were concerned. 

A distinguished American whom I knew well 
at one time told me that Longfellow had spoken 
of a certain great American reformer and anti- 
slavery advocate as merely an unnecessary man. 
The idea convej^ed to my mind was that Long- 
fellow chafed at the disturbing of public quiet, or 
rather, public inaction, by any political agitation, 
whatever its purpose. Such, we know, is the 
disposition of many literary men and many 
artists. But so far as I knew of Longfellow, I 
never heard him express any sentiment which 



Famous Afnericans. 15 

was not in favor of the earliest lightening of the 
load of human suffering. 

Charles Sumner, the Statesman. 

Among the letters of introduction which I 
brought out from England to distinguished 
Americans, on my first visit to the United 
States, was one from John Bright to Mr. Charles 
Sumner. I had only occasion to deliver it in a 
formal sort of way. I happened, not long after 
my arrival, to meet Mr. Sumner in the office of 
the New York Independent. 

I was talking with one of the editors of the 
paper, when the door of the room opened, and a 
tall and stately man came in. The moment I 
saw the face and the form, I was clear in my 
mind that somebody well worth knowing had 
entered the room. Then I was introduced to 
Senator Sumner. 

I told him of my letter of introduction to him 
from John Bright, and added that I meant to 
put off presenting it to him until we met in 
Washington, where at that time I had not yet 
been. A certain sort of friendship sprang up 
from that day between Mr. Sumner and myself. 

Sumner was a man who had impressed his 
image somewhat firmly on the English mind. 
Men in England knew of him as a strong and 
most eloquent opponent of slavery, and up to 
the outbreak of the Civil War in the United 
States there was hardly an Englishman who 
was not a convinced opponent of the plantation 
system; but, at the time of which I write, Mr. 
Sumner had made himself personally unpopular 
in England by the course he had taken with 
regard to the Alabama dispute. 



1 6 Famous Americans. 

Mr. Sumner had been a lover of England — 
had been devoted to England. He honored her 
as the country which had made so vast a sacri- 
fice of money to rid herself of the slave system 
in her West Indian colonies and possessions. 
He counted with absolute certainty on Eng- 
land's sympathy with the North when the Civil 
War broke out. When he found that the gov- 
erning classes and the moneyed classes and the 
aristocracy generally were in favor of the South, 
he believed that England had become renegade 
to her own most honored principles. 

Wot the People's Voice. 

He was mistaken. A stranger is very apt to 
confound the utterances of the governing classes 
in England with the voice of the people of 
England. The vast majority of the people 
of England were from first to last on the side of 
the North. Mr. Sumner did not see this. He 
and I had many a long talk over the question ; 
but he could not be reasoned out of his own 
belief. His love for England turned into some- 
thing very like hate. He had been all his life a 
devoted advocate of peace ; now it seemed to 
many as if his heart were set on driving America 
into a war with England. 

He was chairman of the Senate Committee 
on Foreign Relations — a position which, added 
to his personal influence, eloquence and force 
of character, gave him a great place in the con- 
troversy. He started the theory of "consequen- 
tial" or "indirect" damages for the harm done 
by the Alabama — a theory which the govern- 
ment of the United States afterward quietly 
abandoned, and in which neither General Grant 



Famous Americans, 17 

nor Mr. Hamilton Fish, then the Secretary of 
State, had ever put any faith. 

I am not, however, going to try to revive this 
old and dead controversy. I am only concerned 
about the part which Mr. Sumner took in it. 
One day, I think it was in Washington, Mr. 
Sumner was expounding to me his theory of the 
indirect damages. 

He took a sheet of paper, and there he set 
down a sort of chart of his principle. It looked 
on the paper very much like a pedigree, a sort 
of family tree. This act of damage created 
others which went off to the left and were brack- 
eted there ; this other created new damages, too, 
which went off to the right hand, and were 
bracketed there ; and out of each of these grew 
others, going off also to the right and left. I 
have always kept this chart of the consequential 
damages as an interesting historical relic or 
curiosity. 

Powerful — and Ponderous. 

Mr. Sumner's style of speaking impressed me 
as being too elaborately got up. It was very 
powerful, but it was also somewhat ponderous. 
He seemed to me to have the intellectual weak- 
ness, or at all events overcarefulness, which I 
have noticed in other great speakers — the desire 
to make his review of the case absolutely 
exhaustive, to leave nothing whatever unsaid, or 
not sufficiently said. There was a want of per- 
spective — everything was made as prominent as 
everything else. 

Mr. Sumner had not a keen sense of humor, 
as will be seen from an anecdote which he told 
me. Bright, he observed, once told him that it 



1 8 Fa?noiis Americaiis. 

was a great thing for an Englishman to be made 
a Right Honorable. " You see the title sticks to 
you forever." Mr. Sumner seriously believed 
that this was a deliberate expression of Bright's 
own personal feeling and personal ambition. 

Any one who really knew Bright would know 
that that was "only his fun"— his way of 
throwing contempt on the mean ambition of 
other men. I can see in imagination the scorn- 
ful lip and the satirical expression of Bright as 
he promulgated that doctrine. 

" Stick to the States." 

When I was about to leave America, after my 
first visit, a visit of considerable length, I met 
Mr. Sumner, and I told him I was going back to 
Europe. He knew that I was writing a good 
deal for certain American newspapers and maga- 
zines, and he said, "But you are only going en 
conge, I hope?" I explained to him that I 
hoped to return to the States again and again, 
but that I had no intention of giving up London 
as a home. 

He was most kind, and urged me strongly to 
stick to the United States, where, he was good 
enough to say, I had already made many friends. 
I could not alter my plans, however. Even 
already I saw signs of a great political struggle 
coming up for my own country — for Ireland — 
in which I had a hope and an ambition to play 
some part, however insignificant. 

But for that hope and that ambition I should 
probably have settled down in the United States, 
for which I had grown already to have a strong 
and sincere, and even an almost sentimental, 
affection. I have always had a grateful and 



Famous Americans, 19 

genial memory o! Mr. Sumner's kindly advice 
and friendly persistency. 

I have a deep and clearly cut impression of 
him. People said he was overbearing ; I did not 
find him so. Of course he was a man who 
became terribly — I cannot use a weaker word — 
engrossed in any subject which was on his mind. 
I should think that any one who met him 
while he was working out his scheme of the 
indirect damages would have found it hard to 
get him to take much interest in any other 
subject. But when his mind was not thus 
actually absorbed, he could be a delightful 
talker on various subjects. And of what account 
can a man be in political life whose mind is not 
sometimes wholly absorbed in one particular 
subject? 

Greeley, a Great Journalist. 

When I first went to the United States, Horace 
Greeley was one of the men whom every stranger 
wished to see. He was to us a sort of Benjamin 
Franklin. 

We all knew that Greeley had fought his way 
up from utter poverty to become a great journal- 
ist, who could lend a powerful hand in the 
making of cabinets and of presidents. For me, 
as a journalist, such a figure had naturally an 
especial interest. 

Then we had known something of Horace 
Greeley in England. I wrote, in a long since 
forgotten novel of mine, about the Exhibition 
of the year 1851 in London as "the year which 
brought into official cooperation and fellowship 
the three most single-minded, straightforward, 
disinterested men then living in the world — 



20 Famous Americatis. 

Richard Cobden, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, 
and Horace Greeley." These three were, with 
many others, commissioners for the arrangement 
of the great international exhibition in the 
Crystal Palace, the first exhibition of the kind 
ever held. 

The name of the Duke of Wellington seems to 
belong to an age which has become purely his- 
torical. Those who knew Richard Cobden well 
— I was one of them — are fast diminishing in 
numbers. I suppose it is so in the United States 
with those who knew Horace Greeley. Still, 
Horace Greeley was a tj'pical and assuredly, in 
his way, a great American. 

Benevolent and Intelligent. 

I was greatly interested in Mr. Greeley's 
appearance — in the broad, benevolent forehead 
and the kindly, shrewd eyes beaming through 
good-natured spectacles. He reminded me of 
Mr. Pickwick. He reminded me of Count 
Cavour. No man could be disparaged when his 
face and forehead are compared in benevolence 
with those of Mr. Pickwick, and in intelligence 
with those of Count Cavour. 

Mr. Greeley had then a country-place at Chap- 
paqua, and he was living, while in town, at a 
hotel in Union Square. He showed me about 
New York a great deal. He knew instinctively 
what I wanted to see. 

It was a campaign season, and he was stump- 
ing the country for General Grant and Mr. 
Schuyler Colfax. He allowed me to accompany 
him to a number of meetings in New York City 
and New York State and New Jersey. 

I had always heard that he was a very bad 



Famous Americans. 21 

speaker — at public meetings. I did not think 
so. I thought he had that soundest kind of 
eloquence which consists in sending your arrow 
of argument most straightly and directly to its 
mark, I could listen to him with intense and 
unfaltering interest. 

I was often at Mr. Greeley's house, and I met 
him at many houses in New York. He lived in 
a fashion of truly republican simplicity. He 
was fond, however, of dining out, although he 
drank no wine ; he was fond of going to the 
theatre, and he enjoyed in a hearty, boyish 
fashion, all manner of harmless pleasures. 

At the Home of Two Poets. 

His conversation was wonderfully shrewd, 
sharp and intelligent. I used to meet him very 
often on Sunday evenings at the house of the 
two poets, Alice and Phoebe Carey. There used 
to be delightful Sunday evening gatherings at 
their little house just above Union Square — 
simple, modest, unpretentious gatherings, but 
with plenty of intellect to make them attractive. 

Mr. Greeley often went there, and it used 
to interest me greatly to see how the man who 
was really a power in American politics, and 
whose great paper had to be counted as a potent 
factor in every crisis, political or social, could 
throw his whole soul into the pleasant literary 
talks which we used to have there. 

In his quiet simplicity and suppressed strength 
he sometimes reminded me of John Bright ; and, 
indeed, also in an occasional faculty of suddenly 
bracing himself up and bearing down on some- 
body who was becoming too dogmatic and giving 
himself too many airs. 



2 2 Famous Americans. 

Most of the guests who used to assemble in 
those pleasant rooms are long since gone. The 
sisters Carey are both gone. Ole Bull, the once 
famous Norwegian violinist, in his early days 
put forward as a rival of the immortal Paganini, 
is gone. Horace Greeley is gone. Mr. Barnum, 
who was a constant figure there, — I remember 
him as a retiring, quiet man who enjoyed the 
evenings, apparently, but who certainly did not 
seem inclined to talk much to anybody, although 
he could talk very well if anybody took the 
trouble of drawing him out, — Mr. Barnum is 
gone. 

Greeley as a Farmer. 

Greeley was an immense lover of farming and 
gardening, and all that pertains to farm and 
garden. As we say now in London, he " fancied 
himself" in farming and gardening. It was an 
interesting spectacle to see him surrounded by 
farmers — by real, practical farmers — at some 
agricultural meeting near to his country home 
in New York State. 

Nothing could be more touching than the 
veneration which the farmers had for him as a 
politician and a journalist, the way in which 
they looked up to him for light and leading in 
all political and social affairs — and then the 
kindly indulgence, the suppressed compassion 
they had for his utterances on all agricultural 
questions. 

Not one of them would allow Mr. Greeley to 
know what he really thought of Greeley's views 
on agriculture ; but there was not one whose 
face, when the great man talked of farming, did 
not become, as Lady Macbeth says, "a book 



Fa77ious Ain€rica7is, 23 

where men might read strange matters." The 
farmers regarded him, where farming was con- 
cerned, as kindly people might regard a clever 
child digging in his little garden, and occasion- 
ally planting things with their roots in the air. 

There used to be a story about Horace 
Greeley's telling some friend that he had made 
a certain considerable sum in one year by his 
farming operations. Horace explained it all 
item by item. He had got so much for grain, 
so much for vegetables, so much for fruits ; he 
could prove every amount, every figure — there 
could be no mistake about that. But then the 
inconsiderate question was asked. What were the 
expenses — what did it all cost you } 

Then a momentary puzzlement came over 
the political philosopher's expressive face, and 
was followed by a beaming, self-confessing and 
entirely characteristic smile. 

**I never thought of that," he placidly owned 
up. "I quite forgot to take account of the 
expenses." 

"The Past is Secure." 

Greeley once used a very happy phrase to me 
which I have treasured ever since and have 
quoted often. Let me quote it once again. He 
was telling me about some money he had once 
come in for, and which he had muddled away 
somehow, very likely in some quixotic scheme 
of benevolence. 

" It is all gone," he said, "and so much the 
better." Then he paused for a moment, and 
added, in a subdued and convinced tone of voice, 
**The past at least is secure." 

Yes, the past is always secure. I am sure 



24 Famous Americans, 

there was much about Horace Greeley's past 
which is always secure, which could never be 
taken from him — much, too, about his past 
which could never be taken from his country. 

The Pastor of Plymouth Church. 

I first met Henry Ward Beecher in the ofl&ce 
of the Morning Star newspaper in Ivondon. 
The Morning Star, long since dead, was the 
organ of John Bright, and was devoted to 
the cause of the Federal government during 
the American Civil War. Mr. Beecher came 
over to England to advocate tlie cause of the 
Northern States, and he naturally presented 
himself on his arrival in London at the office 
of the Morning Star. It was arranged that he 
should address a great meeting in Exeter Hall. 

At that time public opinion was curiously 
divided in London on the subject of the 
American Civil War. What is called "society" 
went, on the whole, for the South ; the English 
democracy in London and out of it, unlettered 
and well-lettered, went for the North. 

Exeter Hall, when Mr. Beecher entered it, 
was crowded to overflowing. A large number 
of those who had obtained seats were devoted 
advocates of the Southern cause. 

I do not think Mr. Beecher had been quite 
prepared for this. I fancy he was at first under 
the impression that he was about to address an 
entirely sympathetic audience. A very few 
seconds satisfied him that he had a much more 
difficult task to deal with, and I never saw any 
man brace himself up more readily and more 
vigorously for an vinexpected struggle. 

I noticed a curious twinkle in his eye that 



Famous Americans, 25 

seemed to mean business as he pulled himself 
together for the work. He threw off, to begin 
with, some magnificent sentences, as if to let the 
whole of his audience, unfriendly as well as 
friendly, know that he was a speaker worth 
listening to, whom it would be as well not to 
lose the chance of hearing, whether you agreed 
with him or whether you did not. His voice 
rang thrillingly through the great hall, and he 
accomplished his first purpose — he made his 
audience anxious to hear what he might have to 
say. 

Inspired by Interruptions. 

Then he began to show his gift of reply and of 
repartee. There are some great speakers who 
are utterly put out by interruption ; there are 
other great speakers who are lifted and inspired 
to their very greatest by interruption. Mr. 
Beecher soon proved himself to be one of the 
latter class. 

Every interrupting sentence brought back a 
reply, keen, sarcastic, rhetorical, crushing. In 
the course of his speech he said something about 
the religious feeling of the North. "Religious 
feeling," some one cried out, " and war ! " The 
meaning was obvious — you Northerners call 
yourselves religious, and yet you carry on war. 
The reply came as the explosion of the gun- 
powder follows the touch of fire. 

** Religion and war ! " Mr. Beecher called out. 
"And what is the device on the national flag of 
England ? Is it not the cross upon the field of 
blood?" 

Before long Beecher had his audience with 
him. He did not, indeed, convert his opponents. 



26 Famous Americafis. 

but he reduced them to silence. They had two 
reasons for silence. The}' really wanted to 
catch all he said, and they knew that they could 
gain nothing by interruption. Therefore they 
let him alone and listened. 

" I hope you were satisfied," I said to him 
after the meeting. 

" I should be very hard to be pleased if I was 
not," was his smiling reply. 

In His Own Pulpit. 

Time went on and the war was over, and I next 
met Mr. Beecher in the United States. I took 
out some letters of introduction to him, and I 
went, very naturally, to hear him preach in his 
church at Brooklyn. 

I thought him then, and still think him, one 
of the greatest popular preachers that I ever 
heard, although I did not become reconciled to 
the way in which he occasionally dealt with 
sacred subjects in the pulpit. 

I met him from time to time in New York, 
but he was not then ver}- much given to making 
visits to New York, except to preach from some 
pulpit or speak from some platform. I have one 
very clear, one quite ineffaceable memory of his 
eloquence as an after-dinner speaker. There 
was a banquet given by the late Cyrus W. Field 
of New York to the commissioners sent out 
from England to make arrangements for the 
Alabama arbitration. Far down on the list of 
speakers came Henry Ward Beecher, who was to 
reply to some kindly sentiment about England 
and America. 

The audience was pretty well wearied out. 
The English commissioners had never heard Mr. 



Famous Americans, 27 

Beecher, and were, I believe, under the impres- 
sion that he was sure to make a very long 
speech, and just then they would hardly have 
enjoyed a very long speech from Demosthenes. 

"Ten Resplendent Minutes." 

Up rose the great preacher, and enchanted 
the audience during ten resplendent minutes. 
Never did I hear more eloquence, more humor, 
more pathos, more common sense, more impas- 
sioned philanthropy put into an address, and all 
in ten minutes. Somehow it did not seem to be 
short, there was so much in it. The audience 
held their breath, fearing to lose a word of it. 
When the speaker broke the spell and sat down, 
there v/as a positive reverberation of applause. 
Sir Stafford Northcote told me afterward that he 
had never known such a feat accomplished by 
an orator in so short a time before. 

Mr. Beecher had many theories about the art 
of public speaking and the way of managing an 
audience. He used to advise less experienced 
orators to begin in rather a low tone, so as to 
catch hold of the watchful attention of the 
meeting, and then, when that attention was 
secured, to let the voice go as far as it would. 

I have heard other orators advise a man about 
to address a great meeting to begin with the full 
strength and clearness of his voice, so as to give 
the audience the comfort of knowing from the 
very first sentence that they would have no 
difficulty in following all he was likely to say. 
I do not know whether there are any theories 
really valuable in the art of oratory — really 
valuable, I mean, as applicable to all sorts of 
men. 



2 8 Famous Americans. 

I remember Mr. Beecher giving me some 
suggestions once as to the management of a 
great American public meeting, and I remember, 
too, that I felt constrained to reply : " I am sure 
all that is quite right and quite practicable, if 
you could only endow me with your voice and 
your electric power and your superb control 
over masses of men." 

I take it that Beecher's method was the out- 
growth and not the inspiration of Beecher's 
eloquence. I have heard speakers who on the 
whole fascinated me more than Mr. Beecher did. 

I have heard speakers with whom I was more 
in what I may call artistic sympathy. John 
Bright was one of these, and Mr. Gladstone, and 
so also was Wendell Phillips. But I hold it 
among my most treasured experiences to have 
listened to some of Henry Ward Beecher's 
popular speeches. 

Heroes of the Civil War. 

My mind carries me back to what I may call a 
rally of the Army of the Potomac in Boston 
somewhere, I think, about the year 1872. It 
was, if I remember rightly, a sort of movable 
annual festival of the officers and men of that 
army. 

I was courteously invited to be one of the 
guests at the great festival in honor of the Army 
of the Potomac, and very pleased and proud I 
was to be favored by such an invitation. I well 
remember the scene in the drawing-room of the 
Parker House — I think it was the Parker House 
— on the evening of the dinner. There had 
been various pageants and gatherings already ; 
but the dinner was especially interesting to me 



Famous Americans, 29 

because it brought me so near to manv of the 
men who were famo'^s in the war, and whose 
careers I had followed in London with keenly 
interested eyes and soul. 

Here in this drawing - room stood General 
Meade, one of the chief heroes of the hour — 
General Meade, who had turned the tide of war 
at Gettysburg when he drove back the invading 
army of General Lee. He struck me as being 
singularly like Thackeray's Colonel Newcome 
in appearance and manner, in noble simplicity, 
in manly, soldierly modesty. 

I had an opportunity of meeting General 
Meade several times during the rally of the 
Army of the Potomac. I remember going with 
him to see a large painting of the Battle of 
Gettysburg in some public gallery of Boston ; 
and I well remember the modest, quiet, self- 
effacing way in which he e:splained the move- 
ments of the fight, and showed what other men 
had done in it. 

General Sheridan. 

But the figure of General Meade is not the one 
that comes most strongly and clearly out in my 
recollections of that pleasant time in Boston. 
A: one of ihe gatherings I was presented by my 
friend. General Custer, to Gen. Philip Sheridan. 
Now General Sheridan was a man whose deeds 
and whose fame had made an immense impres- 
sion on the minds of most people in England. 
Grant. Sherman. Sheridan. Robert E. Lee and 
Stone^vall Jackson — these were, to our think- 
ing, the heroes and demigods of the war. To me 
Sheridan had a peculiar attraction naturally, for 
he was a man of the Insh race — that marrellous 



30 Famous Americans. 

fighting Irish race, who have contributed daring 
soldiers and skilled officers and famous generals 
to every country in the civilized w^orld where 
men have battled against men ! 

I looked on Sheridan with a national sympa- 
thy and pride, for I felt that he had kept up 
with splendor the grand old traditions of the 
race ; and of course I could not but think all the 
more of him because he had been fighting for 
the cause which had the whole sympathy of my 
heart. His was not certainly a very striking 
figure from the point of view of the painter or 
the sculptor. He was short, rather squatty, and 
of very high complexion. He had a broad chest, 
a strong frame and, for his stature, a command- 
ing presence. 

"A Sunburnt Napoleon." 

He was very Napoleonic in feature if not in 
complexion — a Napoleon sunburnt by cam- 
paigning — no fierceness of sun or battle, as we 
know, could ever change the olive-tinted pallor 
of Napoleon's face. But Sheridan decidedly 
had much that was Napoleonic in his appear- 
ance. General Custer brought me up and 
presented me to Sheridan, and we had some 
talk — some talks, then and after — which I 
still hold in delighted memory. 

I remember, before meeting Sheridan, I had 
had some conversation with General Grant in 
which the name and the career of General 
Sheridan came up. Grant delighted me as an 
Irishman by telling me that the common idea 
that Sheridan was only a brilliant, daring and 
successful soldier — a sort of Irish-American 
Murat — was a mere error. 



Famous Americans. 



31 



He spoke in the highest language of Sheri- 
dan's military genius, foresight, self-control ; 
pictured him as a genuine master in the art of 
war. Sheridan, he said emphatically, was a 
man who could command an army of a million 
soldiers, and do anything with them. I need 
hardly say that all this only increased my eager- 
ness to meet the man who had " pushed things" 
and brought the war to a close. 

Meetings with General Grant. 

I met General Grant several times, both in the 
United States and in England. The first time I 
ever saw him he was placidly smoking a cigar 
on the steps of the White House. I was accom- 
panied by the late Mr. Cyrus W. Field, who 
presented me, and I had some moments of talk 
with General Grant, who did not impress me at 
all as the shy and silent person he was then 
usually represented to be. 

I met him after that in America and, as I 
have said, in London. I had some talk with 
him at a dinner-party in London, given, if I 
remember rightly, by Mr. John Russell Young. 
I was very much impressed by the clear and 
strong good sense of General Grant. More than 
that, I was impressed by a certain nimbleness 
of mind — I do not know any other way of 
putting it — which enabled him to grasp and 
to reply upon questions not previously con- 
sidered by him. 

I asked him about one or two points then in 
dispute between England and certain European 
countries, and which might have presented a 
certain analogy with some of the once disputed 
claims between England and America. He 



32 Famous Americans. 

paused for a moment, thought for a moment, 
and then gave me his ideas. Time and events 
have justified his opinions. 

** Black Jack'' Logan. 

Going back once again to that festival of the 
Army of the Potomac in Boston, I may be 
allowed to bring up a recollection of John 
Ivogan, — or Fighting Black Jack Logan, as he 
used to be called. I recollect vividly his burn- 
ing dark eyes, his long, dark, lank hair, his 
dare-devil look, his "big Injun" presence, his 
eloquence in public speech, his vivacity and 
his audacity in private conversation. 

He fascinated me so much that I found in him 
the general idea for a prominent figure in one of 
my earlier novels. Of course I did not draw him 
to the life, and I put him into totally different 
conditions from those under which he really 
lived; but I made him a fighter in the great 
Civil War, and I broiight him over to London. 

He seemed to me from the first to be a man 
who must have had some stor}'^ behind him, and 
so I felt myself all the more free to drag him 
into my story. It w^as not an unfriendly picture, 
and in any case it did him no harm, for it does 
not appear ever to have been recognized. 



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